Office and home local area networks are becoming extremely popular. Local networks may provide a system for sharing available resources and transferring data among devices within the network. An example of a protocol for local networks is the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). An advantage of DHCP is that a DHCP server automatically assigns an Internet Protocol (IP) address to each DHCP client or host on a local area network. Such automatic assignment of IP addresses allows easier use by consumers because it does not require any user interaction. As a result, the DHCP server is typically always enabled on small office or home local area networks.
However, several advanced consumer features require that a user identify a specific host and assign a static IP address to the host. For example, blocking of Internet access from a host or designation of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) host in a local area network may require a fixed IP address. For networks in which the DHCP server is always enabled, the user is not allowed to assign fixed or static IP addresses to hosts as required. Further, even if the user has the ability to assign fixed IP addresses to hosts, it is difficult for consumers, especially users of a home network, to determine whether a host has a specific feature which requires a static IP address and then to manually obtain and assign a static IP address to such a host.
Consequently, it would be advantageous if there were a method and a system that assigned appropriate IP addresses to hosts on a local area network depending upon the features of the hosts desired by the user. It would also be advantageous if there were a method and a system that provided a list of hosts in a local area network and the features of each host to a user, allowed the user to select the features desired for each host, determined if a static IP address was required for each host based upon the user's selections, and assigned a static IP address to each host if required.